NADIG, MARIE-THRSE

born March 8, 1954, Tanneboden, Switz. Swiss Alpine skier who won surprise victories over the pre-Olympic favourite, Austrian Annemarie Moser-Prll, in the downhill and giant slalom events at the 1972 Olympic Games in Sapporo, Japan. At 17, Nadig had never won a World Cup race and was not considered a threat to the favoured Prll. When Nadig finished the downhill course with a time of 1 min 36.68 sec, almost a third of a second faster than Prll, the skiing world was stunned. Three days later, Nadig again surprised Prll in the giant slalom event, finishing 0.85 second ahead of her rival. She was a member of the Swiss team at the 1976 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, but a bout with the flu kept her out of downhill competition and contributed to a disappointing fifth-place finish in the giant slalom. Her final appearance at the Olympics was at the 1980 Games in Lake Placid, New York, U.S., where she was considered the favourite to win the downhill event, after collecting six downhill victories during the 1980 World Cup season. Nadig was defeated in the downhill race by her longtime rival Moser-Prll, but she did race well enough to earn a third-place Olympic bronze medal. Considered one of the best female skiers of her generation, Nadig reportedly credited her gold-medal performance at the Sapporo Games to the inspiration of the movie The Love Bug (1969), in which Herbie, a tiny Volkswagen car, races against Grand Prix cars and wins. During the flat stretch before the finish line, Nadig is said to have imagined herself to be Herbie and sank into a lower and lower crouch, giving her the reduced wind resistance that she needed to win.